Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

In politics you win some and you lose some. If the Drudge Report links cited above are any indication, the White House, the Congress, the Republicans and the Democrats are all on the losing side of public opinion. They have lost the confidence of the people no matter what side of the publical spectrum they're on.

As the Wall Street Journal's sagacious columnist, Kim Strassel, noted in the Friday edition “For
months now, the GOP has been held hostage by a faction of its party that
deluded itself into believing President Obama might be rolled on his signature
health-care law. Witness now an equally grand delusion on the Democratic side,
one that President Obama nurtures at his peril”

“According
to Democrats, their steadfast refusal to negotiate on the government shutdown
or the debt ceiling is rooted in a belief that now is the moment to
"break" the GOP "fever." Democrats are furious that
Republicans today use every Washington deadline to extract a spending
concession—and insist they must be broken of that habit.”

What
we are witnessing is the collision of two different political delusions, one
held by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party that President Obama could
be moved to accept any changes—other than those he arbitrarily and unilaterally
makes—to Obamacare and the other by the Far Left of the Democrat Party that
Obamacare, the Valhalla of its decades-long dream of universal healthcare can
work without destroying the finest healthcare system and taking the economy
down with it.

Those
who lived through the Great Depression often refer to those times as “feeling
tired all the time.” That’s a good description of the psychological condition
of depression as well. After five years of President Obama, a lot of people
just feel too tired to fight. By mid-afternoon on Friday it was clear that the
trucker protest was not going to be the big event that its organizers
anticipated. “Truckers Ride for the Constitution” may or may not pick up some
more participants, but it will be far less than the 10,000 hoped for.

One
has to wonder how many veterans will show up for the October 13 protest that is
planned. The ones who tossed the barricades aside at the World War II Memorial
on the National Mall may have done more to express the public’s exasperation
with the government shutdown as any mass protest.

The
curious aspect of the shutdown is how the blame keeps shifting back and forth
between the President and the Republicans in the House. The shutdown has come
about from the demand of the Republican leadership that the White House make
some concessions to reduce the spending and borrowing that has produced a $17
trillion debt. This has been tied to the looming October 17 deadline that the
Treasury says the debt ceiling must be raised or the nation will default.

That
claim is bogus. The government takes in billions every week, enough to meet its
obligation to pay the interest on the treasury notes it has sold by way of
borrowing to pay to maintain programs that are astonishingly wasteful, either
from fraud or the compulsion to give taxpayer’s money away. The Republicans
know this. The Democrats know this.

The
President has been insisting for days that he would not negotiate. Well, we all
knew he would not negotiate anything regarding Obamacare, including something
sensible like delaying its implementation for a year. He already gave a delay
to Big Business. How about the rest of the population?

So,
both have played a role in the shutdown given the fact that negotiation,
compromise, is the way our government is designed to function.

This
isn’t “politics as usual.” This is one part of the government, the House of
Representatives, doing what the Constitution says it must, overseeing the
expenditure of every last penny the government spends. And it is two other
parts, the Senate and the White House, controlled by the Democratic Party, refusing
to compromise.

It
is the American people waking up to discover that (1) President Obama is
content to inflict as much pain as possible on them and (2) that a frayed and
divided Republican Party cannot, will not hold firm to secure some protection
against Obamacare and a reduction in government spending.

At
this writing, the biggest losers will be the American people. Well, at least
those who do not work for the government and live outside the Beltway.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.